Ubuntu 13.04 Raring Ringtail: it looks like two interesting changes will land in Unity soon: support for switching between windows of the same application by scrolling on the application icon in the Unity Launcher and a new Unity style for shutdown dialog boxes.

Here's are a few screenshots with the new Unity shutdown / restart / lock screen / suspend dialog boxes:

This change has been implemented by Marco Trevisan and it's not a new idea - the new Unity-like dialog boxes were mentioned in an old "GNOME 3 System Settings changes" spec. from 2011.

With the new design, the Restart entry has been removed from the Session Indicator since when selecting "Shut down...", there are options to either shut down or restart the computer. However, I'm not sure if that's a good idea since users will probably look for the restart option in the Session Indicator menu.

Also, one thing that I've found annoying in my test is that you can't close the dialogs using the Esc key which, given its design (similar for instance with the lightbox image viewer used on many websites, including on WebUpd8), I would have expected to work. Update: the code has been updated and the shutdown dialogs can now be closed using the Esc key.

Remember: Raring is still in development so this might change.

As for the new option that allows you to switch between windows by scrolling on the application icon in the Unity Launcher, the feature has been implemented by Andrea Azzarone and is basically a continuation of the work to bring a more effective window switching experience for applications with multiple windows using the Unity Launcher, which has begun with the quicklists window switching feature which we've mentioned a while back.

Video

The code for these changes has been proposed for merging last night and the new feature that allows you to switch between windows by scrolling on the app icon has already been merged so it should land in Ubuntu 13.04 Raring Ringtail (probably) with the next Unity daily upload, while the new dialogs feature is still pending approval. Update: the new Unity-style shutdown dialogs code has been merged so it should land in Ubuntu 13.04 Raring Ringtail soon.

Update: these changes are now available by default in Ubuntu 13.04 Raring Ringtail.

In other Ubuntu 13.04 Raring Ringtail related news, the new Nautilus and Software Updater icons have finally landed, but for now only the Software Updater icon shows up for now because of a symbolic link that points to the old icon in the Ubuntu Mono icon theme, which should be fixed soon. Here are a couple of screenshots with the new icons: